In a networked environment, email may be routed from a sending client over the network to one or more destination recipient mailbox servers. Conventional email routing involves routing an email message through mail transport agents or servers using simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP). Typically, when an email message passes through a mail transport agent, data associated with the email message may be only briefly stored on the mail transport agent for a period long enough to receive the email message from the sender and to send the email message to the next server on the email transmission route.
In an email routing scenario using agent(s) without local storage of the email message data on the mail transport agent, if downstream recipient servers fail, lose, or destroy the message data, then there may be no backup copy of the email message data and the data may be permanently lost. To support high availability scenarios, backup or duplicate copies of transmitted email message data may be needed to be maintained and stored such that if data is lost, a duplicate copy may be efficiently located and provided upon a request by a recipient server within the network.